Mister Rauschenberg's Neighborhood

By greg on April 29, 2011 1:36 PM

Christie's is selling The Tower, a 1957 combine by Robert Rauschenberg which Victor and Sally Ganz bought from Betty Parsons in 1976. The work is a double portrait assembled from found, painted objects and light bulbs, and was originally part of the set for a Paul Taylor Dance Company production based on the myth of Adonis. The costumes for the production were designed by Rauschenberg's partner Jasper Johns.

Did I say partner? I guess I meant neighbor. Here's Christie's quoting Paul Schimmel from his 2005 Combines exhibition catalogue:

While Rauschenberg's work does respond to the painterly traditions of the 1950s, it does so in a manner that isolates the act of painting from the complete composition. For him, painting became a thing, an object treated similarly to Assemblage in which elements were organized on a non-hierarchical surface. Rauschenberg took aspects of Picasso and the Cubist collage, Kurt Schwitters, and the Surrealism of Joseph Cornell and created a three-dimensional, collage-based art. Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg defined the American art of the 1950s; Pop art would have been inconceivable without their respective breakthroughs. Incidentally, many of their most important advancements were devised when they were most closely associated, living as neighbors, during the second half of the 1950s-the period during which The Tower (1957) was created.

Schimmel goes on to note that the appearance here of a broom "anticipates Jasper Johns's use of the broom in Fool's House (1962), at a time when they were no longer neighbors." Yet while he notes that "Lights and bulbs," one of the defining elements of The Tower, "recur in numerous works"--of Rauschenberg--the fact that just months later, while they were still, uh, neighborly, Johns chose a light bulb as the subject of his first sculpture goes completely unmentioned.

The Tower is very autobiographical, using found imagery, found objects that would give you clues to aspects of Rauschenberg's life. Rauschenberg was a gregarious, outgoing, very generous person, but he spoke often in sort of cryptic, very defined ways. And in Tower you have this sort of personage, which to me is just so perfectly Rauschenberg, you really feel this inside/outside aspect of it. And to me, that really defines how his art was: very autobiographical, giving you clues, but not necessarily the full story.

But what if it goes both ways? The Tower, Schimmel writes, dates from "the middle of Rauschenberg's Combine period, which extends roughly from 1954 to 1962." Which is, incidentally, also the period Johns and Rauschenberg were a couple. What if combines came from Johns? Or silk screening?

Or maybe it's not so simplistic or binary. Maybe "their respective breakthroughs" were collaborative? Maybe they talked through and worked through "their most important advancements" together? How does Target with Plaster Casts relate to the combines of 1955? Or how do the combines relate to Johns' object-laden paintings of the post-breakup era? What do the famously autobiographical, emotionally-charged-yet-obdurate works of these two artists reveal about each other, their life together, their production, and the culture in which they lived?

For three generations now, the art and art history worlds have been arguing for the separation of these two artists and the distinct, unknowable power of their "respective" achievements. Some day maybe we can tell the full story.